by Mark O'Brien | Jan 14, 2015
Though I manage brands for a living, I’m not objective enough to position and manage my own brand. I’m too close to it. Every brand owner has the same myopic inability. But many of them resist objectivity. And when presented with the new, the push is on to...
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 9, 2015
If you do a Google search for dreaded words in business, you’ll get millions of hits. That’s a lot of dread. And it’s a reminder that dread is contextual. Edward G. Brown thinks the most dreaded words in business are Got a minute? Shell Haffner...
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 8, 2015
For those of us who care about such things, it’s fascinating to note that keyboard design and composition have remained largely unchanged since Enrico Royal brought the first typewriter to the United States aboard Christopher Columbus’ flagship, Santa...
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 6, 2015
I left my last corporate job 20 years ago. Even then, I was aware of a phenomenon that continues to become more prevalent: Kleptus vocabularus — the stealing of a lexicon germane to one context for the purpose of deliberately misleading in another context. More...
by Mark O'Brien | Dec 31, 2014
In the good old days (when were those?), companies differentiated themselves by purporting to be the best at what they did. One specialization. One concentration. One reliable deliverable or set thereof. That was then. This is now. Can a company that did one thing...
